Matrix Podcast

Recorded on December 4, 2025, this video features a Social Science Matrix Distinguished Lecture, "To Know a Place," presented by journalist and author Alexis Madrigal.
 
Madrigal has long explored how technology, culture, and environment shape our lives; from his work co-founding The COVID Tracking Project to his books Powering the Dream and The Pacific Circuit. In this talk, Madrigal turns his attention to the question of how we come to know a place. Drawing on his background as a reporter, writer, and thinker of cities, landscapes, and histories, he explores different ways of writing about and understanding place, revealing how perspective, memory, and narrative inform the stories we tell about the world around us.
 
About the Speaker
 
Alexis Madrigal is a journalist in Oakland, California. He is the co-host of KQED's current affairs show, Forum, and a contributing writer at The Atlantic, where he co-founded The COVID Tracking Project. Previously, he was the editor-in-chief of Fusion and a staff writer at Wired. His latest book, The Pacific Circuit, came out in March 2025 from MCD x FSG. He is the proprietor of the Oakland Garden Club, a newsletter for people who like to think about plants.
 
Madrigal authored the book Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology. He has been a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley's Information School and UC Berkeley's Center for the Study of Technology, Science, and Medicine as well as an affiliate with Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. He was born in Mexico City, grew up in rural Washington State, and went to Harvard.
 
A transcript of this recording is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/alexis-madrigal.

Recorded on December 2, 2025, this video features a talk by Maximilian Kasy, Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford, presenting his book The Means of Prediction: How AI Really Works (and Who Benefits).
This talk was part of a symposium series presented by the UC Berkeley Computational Research for Equity in the Legal System Training Program (CRELS), which trains doctoral students representing a variety of degree programs and expertise areas in the social sciences, computer science and statistics.
The talk was co-sponsored by Social Science Matrix, the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI) Tech Cluster, the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS), and the UC Berkeley Department of Economics.
A transcript of this recording can be found at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/max-kasy.
About the Book
AI is inescapable, from its mundane uses online to its increasingly consequential decision-making in courtrooms, job interviews, and wars. The ubiquity of AI is so great that it might produce public resignation—a sense that the technology is our shared fate.
As economist Maximilian Kasy shows in The Means of Prediction, artificial intelligence, far from being an unstoppable force, is irrevocably shaped by human decisions—choices made to date by the ownership class that steers its development and deployment. Kasy shows that the technology of AI is ultimately not that complex. It is insidious, however, in its capacity to steer results to its owners' wants and ends.
Kasy clearly and accessibly explains the fundamental principles on which AI works, and, in doing so, reveals that the real conflict isn't between humans and machines, but between those who control the machines and the rest of us.
The Means of Prediction offers a powerful vision of the future of AI: a future not shaped by technology, but by the technology's owners. Amid a deluge of debates about technical details, new possibilities, and social problems, Kasy cuts to the core issue: Who controls AI's objectives, and how is this control maintained? The answer lies in what he calls "the means of prediction," or the essential resources required for building AI systems: data, computing power, expertise, and energy.
As Kasy shows, in a world already defined by inequality, one of humanity's most consequential technologies has been and will be steered by those already in power. Against those stakes, Kasy offers an elegant framework both for understanding AI's capabilities and for designing its public control. He makes a compelling case for democratic control over AI objectives as the answer to mounting concerns about AI's risks and harms.
The Means of Prediction is a revelation, both an expert undressing of a technology that has masqueraded as more complicated and a compelling call for public oversight of this transformative technology.
About the Speaker

Maximilian Kasy received his PhD at UC Berkeley and joined Oxford after appointments at UCLA and Harvard University. His current research interests focus on social foundations for statistics and machine learning, going beyond traditional single-agent decision theory. He also works on economic inequality, job guarantee programs, and basic income. Kasy teaches a course on foundations of machine learning at the economics department at Oxford. Learn more at his website.

Recorded on November 17, 2025, this recording features a talk by Seth Lunine, Lecturer in the UC Berkeley Department of Geography, who presented a talk reflecting on his experiences with collaborative scholarship between UC Berkeley undergraduates and community-based organizations in Oakland's Fruitvale District.
Lunine's courses are part of the American Cultures Engaged Scholarship (ACES) Program, which aims to transform how faculty's community-engaged scholarship is valued, to enhance learning for students through a combination of teaching and practice, and to create new knowledge that has an impact both in the community and the academy.
In Fall 2024, students in Lunine's Geography 50AC: California collaborated with Canticle Farm and Restorative Media, two nonprofits located in the Oakland Fruitvale District. ACES students developed story maps to represent the spatial histories of the Canticle Farm site. To create these story maps, they analyzed historical newspaper articles, real estate promotions, archeological reports, and city planning documents, revealing legacies of Indigenous stewardship, the Brown Power movement, redlining, and criminalization that has shaped Canticle Farm. Another group of ACES students collaborated with the Executive Director of Restorative Media, an organization led by formerly incarcerated and systems-impacted people, to interview Canticle Farm stakeholders about their movement activism and life stories.
This event was co-sponsored by the Berkeley Public Service Center, and presented as part of a new event series featuring talks by UC Berkeley lecturers and professors who earn praise from students for their teaching. The speakers are invited to deliver a favorite standalone lecture, reimagined for anyone curious to learn.
A transcript of this talk is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/seth-lunine.

The technical world of insurance is a critical lens through which to understand the escalating crises in climate change and housing. As climate risks intensify, both public and private homeowner insurance markets face unprecedented pressure, revealing the interconnections between housing affordability, wealth inequality, and the broader financialization of our communities.
Recorded on November 13, 2025, this panel brought together experts to explore the intersection of insurance, housing, and climate. The panel featured Stephen Collier, Professor of City & Regional Planning at UC Berkeley; Desiree Fields, Associate Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley; and Dave Jones, Senior Director of the Climate Risk Initiative at UC Berkeley School of Law. Meg Mills-Novoa, Assistant Professor with a joint appointment to the Division of Society and Environment in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management and the Energy and Resources Group, moderated.
The panel was co-sponsored by UC Berkeley Department of Political Science, the Department of Geography, and the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI).
A transcript of this recording is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/financializing-disaster.

Physical spaces profoundly influence community well-being. Understanding this relationship is crucial for leveraging planning and policy to foster equitable outcomes.
Recorded on November 3, 2025, this panel brought together experts to explore how thoughtful planning and strategic policy can shift power toward communities, creating conditions where all can thrive. The discussion bridged diverse perspectives on environmental conservation, design psychology, and disability studies to illuminate steps toward more just and inclusive environments.
The panel featured You-Tien Hsing, Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley; Sally Augustin, Lecturer at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health in the Interdisciplinary Center for Healthy Workplaces and Principal at Design With Science; and Karen Nakamura, Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Disability Studies Lab at UC Berkeley. Meredith Sadin, Associate Professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy and Senior Researcher at the UC Berkeley Possibility Lab, moderated.
The panel was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Interdisciplinary Center for Healthy Workplaces, the Possibility Lab, the Center for Research on Social Change, the Department of Geography, and the Department of Anthropology.
A video and transcript of this podcast are available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/spaces-for-thriving